Poverty at a 30-year high: who picks up the bill at home?

According to Le Monde, in an article from its Décodeurs fact-checking team published on 5 November, France's poverty rate has never been this high in at least thirty years. The paper notes that the situation hits certain categories of the population especially hard and often comes with material and social deprivation. The summary we have does not detail the exact rate or the categories concerned: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not a finding of Le Monde.

A poverty rate is a statistic. Material deprivation is a kitchen: the dish you cut back on, the heating you turn down a notch, the school trip you cannot pay for. When we say "deprivation", think of someone who, every evening, adds up the sums before cooking dinner.

First clue: wages. We like to talk about poverty as an accident that strikes those who are "outside the system". Yet many poor people work, or work in pieces: part-time hours, short contracts, scattered shifts. Employers find flexibility in this; households find a budget they can never predict. Expenses, meanwhile, fall due on fixed dates: rent, energy, canteen fees.

Second clue, less visible: what is called social reproduction. Capitalism needs a kind of work that produces people rather than goods: minding children, nursing, cooking, looking after the elderly. This work is often unpaid or badly paid, and largely carried out by women. When health, childcare or housing services decline, the work does not vanish: it shifts onto households. In our view, this is where austerity turns into poverty. A place in a nursery that cannot be found means a mother who cuts her hours, and so her pay, and so her rights.

Alexandra Kollontai already described, in Communism and the Family, a woman who had become a wage earner "without her worries as a housewife or mother having been lightened" (our translation). A century later, the double shift has not disappeared; it has simply acquired a smartphone and a rota app.

It would be wrong to see this as a purely private matter. Trade unions fight over the price of labour: pay, hours, conditions. This struggle is necessary, but it addresses the effects more than the wage system itself. Yet it does restore bargaining power to those who have little of it, and that is precisely what is contested whenever there is talk of limiting the right to strike or extending "essential services" rules.

What we still do not know: which categories are hit hardest, and to what extent the retreat of public services has driven the rise. What we do know is that nobody lives on an index. A poverty record is not a fate sent from heaven: it is the result of choices about wages, services and the sharing of care. Those choices can be debated, and those who pay the price have good reason to want a seat at the table.